“What a joke, Simon, life is.
“From vanity we buy lenses that see all and so lose everything!
“And by giving up some small bit-piece of so-called wisdom, reality, truth, we gain back an entirety of life! Who does not know this? Writers do! Intuited novels are far more ‘true’ than all your scribbled data-fact reportage in the history of the world!
“But then at last I had to face the great twin fractures lying athwart my conscience. My eyes. My ears. Holy Cow, I said, softly. The thousand folk who tread my offices and creaked my couches and looked for echoes in my Delphic Cave, why, why, preposterous! I had seen none of them, nor heard any clear!
“Who was that Miss Harbottle?
“What of old Dinsmuir?
“What was the real color, look, size of Miss Grimes?
“Did Mrs. Scrapwight really resemble and speak like an Egyptian papyrus mummy fallen out of a rug at my desk?
“I could not even guess. Two thousand days of fogs surrounded my lost children, mere voices calling, fading, gone.
“My God, I had wandered the marketplace with an invisible sign BLIND AND DEAF and people had rushed to fill my beggar’s cup with coins and rush off cured. Cured! Isn’t that miraculous, strange? Cured by an old ricket with one arm gone, as ’twere, and one leg missing. What? What did I say right to them out of hearing wrong? Who indeed were those people? I will never know.
“And then I thought: there are a hundred psychiatrists about town who see and hear more clearly than I. But whose patients walk naked into high seas or leap off playground slides at midnight or truss women up and smoke cigars over them.
“So I had to face the irreducible fact of a successful career.
“The lame do not lead the lame, my reason cried, the blind and halt do not cure the halt and the blind! But a voice from the far balcony of my soul replied with immense irony: Bee’swax and Bull-Durham! You, Immanuel Brokaw, are a porcelain genius, which means cracked but brilliant! Your occluded eyes see, your corked ears hear. Your fractured sensibilities cure at some level below consciousness! Bravo!
“But no, I could not live with my perfect imperfections. I could not understand nor tolerate this smug secret thing which, through screens and obfuscations, played meadow doctor to the world and cured field beasts.
“I had several choices then. Put my corneal lenses back in? Buy ear radios to help my rapidly improving sense of sound? And then? Find I had lost touch with my best and hidden mind which had grown comfortably accustomed to thirty years of bad vision and lousy hearing? Chaos for both curer and cured.
“Stay blind and deaf and work? It seemed a dreadful fraud, though my record was laundry-fresh, pressed white and clean.
“So I retired.
“Packed my bags and ran off into golden oblivion to let the incredible wax collect in my most terrible strange ears . . .”
We rode in the bus along the shore in the warm afternoon. A few clouds moved over the sun. Shadows misted on the sands and the people strewn on the sands under the colored umbrellas.
I cleared my throat.
“Will you ever return to practice again, doctor?”
“I practice now.”
“But you just said—”
“Oh, not officially, and not with an office or fees, no, never that again.” The doctor laughed quietly. “I am sore beset by the mystery anyway. That is, of how I cured all those people with a laying on of hands even though my arms were chopped off at the elbows. Still, now, I do keep my ‘hand’ in.”
“How?”
“This shirt of mine. You saw. You heard.”
“Coming down the aisle?”
“Exactly. The colors. The patterns. One thing to that man, another to the girl, a third to the boy. Zebras, goats, lightnings, Egyptian amulets. What, what, what? I ask. And: answer, answer, answer. The Man in the Rorschach Shirt.
“I have a dozen such shirts at home.
“All colors, all different pattern mixes. One was designed for me by Jackson Pollack before he died. I wear each shirt for a day, or a week, if the going, the answers, are thick, fast, full of excitement and reward. Then off with the old and on with the new. Ten billion glances, ten billion startled responds!
“Might I not market these Rorschach shirts to your psychoanalyst on vacation? Test your friends? Shock your neighbors? Titillate your wife? No, no. This is my own special private most dear fun. No one must share it. Me and my shirts, the sun, the bus, and a thousand afternoons ahead. The beach waits. And on it, my people!
“So I walk the shores of this summer world. There is no winter here, amazing, yes, no winter of discontent it would almost seem, and death a rumor beyond the dunes. I walk along in my own time and way and come on people and let the wind flap my great sailcloth shirt now veering north, south or south-by-west and watch their eyes pop, glide, leer, squint, wonder. And when a certain person says a certain word about my ink-slashed cotton colors I give pause.
I chat. I walk with them awhile. We peer into the great glass of the sea. I sidewise peer into their soul. Sometimes we stroll for hours, a longish session with the weather. Usually it takes but that one day and, not knowing with whom they walked, scot-free, they are discharged all unwitting patients. They walk on down the dusky shore toward a fairer brighter eve. Behind their backs, the deaf-blind man waves them bon voyage and trots home there to devour happy suppers, brisk with fine work done.
“Or sometimes I meet some half-slumberer on the sand whose troubles cannot all be fetched out to die in the raw light of one day. Then, as by accident, we collide a week later and walk by the tidal churn doing what has always been done; we have our traveling confessional. For long before pent-up priests and whispers and repentances, friends walked, talked, listened, and in the listening-talk cured each other’s sour despairs. Good friends trade hairballs all the time, give gifts of mutual dismays and so are rid of them.
“Trash collects on lawns and in minds. With bright shirt and nail-tipped trash stick I set out each dawn to . . . clean up the beaches. So many, oh, so many bodies lying out there in the light. So many minds lost in the dark. I try to walk among them all, without . . . stumbling . . .”
The wind blew in the bus window cool and fresh, making a sea of ripples through the thoughtful old man’s patterned shirt.
The bus stopped.
Dr. Brokaw suddenly saw where he was and leaped up. “Wait!”
Everyone on the bus turned as if to watch the exit of a star performer. Everyone smiled.
Dr. Brokaw pumped my hand and ran. At the far front end of the bus he turned, amazed at his own forgetfulness, lifted his dark glasses and squinted at me with his weak baby-blue eyes.
“You—” he said.
Already, to him, I was a mist, a pointillist dream somewhere out beyond the rim of vision.
“You . . .” he called into that fabulous cloud of existence which surrounded and pressed him warm and close, “you never told me. What? What?!”
He stood tall to display that incredible Rorschach shirt which fluttered and swarmed with everchanging line and color.
I looked. I blinked. I answered.
“A sunrise!” I cried.
The doctor reeled with this gentle friendly blow.
“Are you sure it isn’t a sunset?” he called, cupping one hand to his ear.
I looked again and smiled. I hoped he saw my smile a thousand miles away within the bus.
“No,” I said. “A sunrise. A beautiful sunrise.”
He shut his eyes to digest the words. His great hands wandered along the shore of his wind-gentled shirt. He nodded. Then he opened his pale eyes, waved once, and stepped out into the world.
The bus drove on. I looked back once.
And there went Dr. Brokaw advancing straight out and across a beach where lay a random sampling of the world, a thousand bathers in the warm light.
He seemed to tread lightly upon a water of people.
The last I saw of him, he was still gloriously afloat.
Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
It was just before midnight on Christmas Eve when Father Mellon woke, having slept for only a few minutes. He had a most peculiar urge to rise, go, and swing wide the front door of his church to let the snow in and then go sit in the confessional to wait.
Wait for what? Who could say? Who might tell? But the urge was so incredibly strong it was not to be denied.
“What’s going on here?” he muttered quietly to himself, as he dressed. “I am going mad, am I not? At this hour, who could possibly want or need, and why in blazes should I—”
But dress he did and down he went and opened wide the front door of the church and stood in awe of the great artwork beyond, better than any painting in history, a tapestry of snow weaving in laces and gentling to roofs and shadowing the lamps and putting shawls on the huddled masses of cars waiting to be blessed at the curb. The snow touched the pavements
